The dawn of the eighteenth century, and the advent of Watteau, brought the signal victory of the Rubenistes. The pompous style of the seventeenth century ebbed away with the life of the _grand monarque_. The new age demanded a new art--the graceful and dainty art of the boudoir. At the very outset, Watteau carried the emotional expressiveness of pigment to a point where it could not be maintained by his followers and imitators. He had never been to Italy; and though he had studied the works of the Venetian colourists, his art was mainly derived from Flemish sources. But the Academy continued to send its most promising pupils to its branch school in Rome, where they were taught to worship at the shrine of Raphael and his followers, and whence they returned to continue the tradition of the School. Thus Italianism did not die, though it became transformed by the ascendency of the Rubens influence and by the new social conditions. Mythology and allegory continued to rule supreme in the art of Boucher, which is the most typical expression of the French eighteenth century, but they are adapted to the decoration of the boudoir, and colour and brushwork are no longer subordinated to design. Boucher, the most French of all French painters, is inconceivable without two centuries of the Italian tradition of design and without Rubens's example of handling paint. In the art of Fragonard, that great virtuoso of the brush, the influence of Rubens becomes absolutely paramount. Only a few youthful failures recall his study of the Italians. Fragonard witnessed the end of the _ancien regime_ and the great political upheaval of the French Revolution. With the monarchy died the sensuous art of the _fetes galantes_. The painting that flourished in the Napoleonic era was more formal, cold, and academic than at any previous epoch. David and his followers sought their inspiration in Roman history, and set purity of line and the dogmas of the School higher than ever. Their idealism was of a bombastic, rhetorical order; their painting absolutely uninspired tinting of pseudo-classic designs. At no period had French art sunk to such a level of dulness. The death of David left his great pupil Ingres, the most perfect draughtsman of the nineteenth century, the undisputed leader of the School. But the day of freedom was at hand--and the liberating word was to be pronounced by Delacroix. The seventeenth-century war between the "Poussinistes" and the "Rubenistes" was to be resumed, although the two parties were now re-christened "Classicists" and "Romanticists." But this time the war was one of deeds, and not of words. Ingres was the leader of an army; Delacroix fought almost single-handed. And, for once, victory did not favour the large battalions. II